This paper presents a GPU-based, fast, and accurate dynamic height field rendering technique that scales well to large scale height fields. Current real-time rendering algorithms for dynamic height fields employ approximate ray-height field intersection methods, whereas accurate algorithms require pre-computation in the order of seconds to minutes and are thus not suitable for dynamic height field rendering. We alleviate this problem by using maximum mipmaps, a hierarchical data structure supporting accurate and efficient rendering while simultaneously lowering the pre-computation costs to negligible levels. Furthermore, maximum mipmaps allow for view-dependent level-of-detail rendering. In combination with hierarchical ray-stepping this results in an efficient intersection algorithm for large scale height fields.

Three-Dimensional Kaleidoscopic Imaging

We introduce three-dimensional kaleidoscopic imaging,
a promising alternative for recording multi-view imagery.
The main limitation of multi-view reconstruction techniques
is the limited number of views that are available from
multi-camera systems, especially for dynamic scenes.
Our new system is based on imaging an object inside a
kaleidoscopic mirror system. We show that this approach
can generate a large number of high-quality views well distributed
over the hemisphere surrounding the object in a
single shot. In comparison to existing multi-view systems,
our method offers a number of advantages: it is possible
to operate with a single camera, the individual views are
perfectly synchronized, and they have the same radiometric
and colorimetric properties.
We describe the setup both theoretically, and provide
methods for a practical implementation. Enabling interfacing
to standard multi-view algorithms for further processing
is an important goal of our techniques.